You could pass right by here and not notice. A glance tells you there’s nothing going on, same old bare trees, no color, didn’t see a living thing. But stand here for a minute.
Don’t pay those sycamores any mind. They bring up the train on spring’s dance. Look over there, across that little pond, against the dark pines. The pink haze. See it?
Look! A whole sweep of pink is everywhere. The colors never look like this any other time of year. Soon, frogs will sing. But now. this overture of waking hues, so pristine, and ringing.
Ghostlike cattails line the lake edge, standing straight and tall as an old guard of soldiers, offering a salute in honor of spring. Their velvety brown pods spill their stuffing onto the ice-capped lake, into the pool of melted water at the field’s edge. Their once-sleek leaves are brittle now and broken, but still they stand, proud to have endured the onslaughts of winter, to be standing in the coming spring’s sun. Now and then red winged blackbirds, just arrived from the south, perch atop them, sounding a salutation, and the cattails hold beneath their weight and are glad.
Overnight, the maple’s red buds burst, freeing their tiny leaves to reach for the sky. They etch a scarlet lace against the deep blue where days ago, there were but bare twigs.
From one of the high branches, a call sounded forth, clear and high, a single note followed by a pause and then repeated. From across the way an answer came,
filling the pauses, and waiting for a reply. Back and forth the two birds called to one another, as if their sole mission was to mark the opening of the buds,
On my window the worlds inside the raindrops are upside-down, with the sky at the bottom and the earth on top. What if you were a bird flying across that upside-down sky? Would you be trapped inside the drop’s edges? Would you guess that a hundred other worlds, much like yours, with birds much like you, were gliding down a transparent surface beside you? Would you feel the slide and make up myths about what it means?
I have no answers. I go outside where up is still the direction of the sky. But then I come to the puddles at the side of the road where trees, of all things, are upside down, too, or, like the mother spruce, stretched on her back in the water, clay smeared across her and a bed of pebbles at her side as if it were all some surrealist work of art.
Even if you walk to a puddle’s far side so that the trees look upright, they are not solid, as they seem to be in the world I (laughingly) call real, and stones hang above them in their watery sky.
Nevertheless, the scene has a kind of beauty to it.
Tomorrow I will wake to sunshine and this will all be gone, these dreams I dreamed on this rainy winter day. “But don’t worry,” I say to them, wrapping them in soft sheets of memory. “I will remember you. I will remember.”
I cannot possibly tell you how glad I am to see these glorious spires, the tips of daffodils, rising from the soil as if joy itself propelled them.
If angels suddenly materialized before my eyes I would not be more stunned or filled with awe than I am by these heaven-pointing fingers in all their wondrous shades of green, that stand before me now.
I’m still a quarter mile from the marsh when I hear them, the red-winged blackbirds. The males sing conk-la-ree, the last note sharp and rising, the females answering with chack-chack-chack in applause.
My approach alarms them. A male darts from the reeds to the top of a young, budding maple and continues its interrupted serenade.
The sun glints off the pond’s waters. The winter-bleached cattails glow golden in its late afternoon light.
A pair of mallards, fresh from my dreams, floats in slow circles near the far shore.
I stand on the hilltop, glad as day to be here, drinking in the sights and the oh-so-welcome song.
A friend tells me that her daffodils are several inches above ground now. Of course she lives a few hundred miles south of me. But still, it’s possible that mine might be sprouting, too.
I walk to the back corner where a patch of them grows wild every year. All I find is matted leaves, wall to wall. I’ll keep watch.
On my way back to the house I stop to say hello to the sentinel I call the Eldest Daughter, a spruce I count among my close and dearly loved companions. Wordlessly, I ask if spring is coming.
Wordlessly, she answers, showing me how her arms are open in welcome, how an overflow of fresh sap is oozing onto her bark. I pat her in thanks.
Always she bestows her gentle lessons in patience.
But I think that, secretly, she likes my anticipation, too.
The dance of winter’s yin and yang is at its balance point. Neither holds sway. Things can tip either way and will, for days. Spring’s advance makes fools of us all.
If I could dance my way to the heart of sun, or step through a portal that led to any star, I imagine the light that I’d see would be a play of hues like these that color the sky tonight.
I imagine I would travel on music played by artisans who drew their sounds from the soul songs of angels.
Glistening crystals that look like the year’s first snow would shimmer all around me sounding their silvery chimes.
I would find myself enveloped in tenderness unlike any that I had ever dreamed or known.
And I would finally understand what my innermost heart had always known to be true: Each of us is real, and known, and dearly, deeply loved.
What lured me up the hillside was the splash of green I spotted from my kitchen window. It was right at the base of the maple where I remembered seeing tall spikes of green first thing last spring. Wiggling with happy anticipation, I pulled on my boots, zipped up my jacket and headed out.
“March Fool!” a knot of little kids laughed from a corner of my mind as I saw that the green I had spotted wasn’t fresh sprouts at all, just ferns left over from last year.
“No!” I shout at the taunting voices. “It’s April Fool, not March. Go home.” They turned and faded into the mental mist, still giggling that I was fooled.
“Even so,” I said, turning to the fern. “You’re quite lovely.” It agreed that I could take its photo in honor of its grace. I thanked it and bid it fare well.
I looked up the hill to choose a path for my climb. A cat seemed to be trapped in the bark of the maple’s trunk there before me. Or was it an owl? You decide.
The stump to the east looked like a horse’s head with its deep brown eye and the green foam around its mouth, proof that it breathed deeply before it finally fell.
And right here at my feet, the roots of a towering giant are decorated with bouquets of seeds and twigs, fallen leaves and lingering ferns, as if others had come before me, leaving gifts on its moss-painted toes.
Then, high above me, a crow’s call cut the air. Looking up, I saw the silhouette of the trees waltzing in the breeze. For a minute or two, I stood at their feet waltzing with them. Then I climbed back down, heading home, glad to have been a March fool.
